


He Lived in a Tin House

by TriDom



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Grief, M/M, Mild Horror, disjointed thoughts, stream of conciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-26 15:02:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19008196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriDom/pseuds/TriDom
Summary: He lost them in a place where the veil is thin. They won't leave him alone and Chris dread a day that they might, when the bowls may stay full, and his wolves will leave him in his tin house, when he'll realize that every piece of it has been in his mind.





	He Lived in a Tin House

**Author's Note:**

> A story I edited and reposted. I didn't think it was good originally, but rereading it, I wanted to put it back up.

He lived in a tin house. 

In the morning, dabbles of orange and red bled through the rust-trimmed holes by the front window. They showed the dust on the thin plank boards. He mopped often. Cleanliness was next to Godliness. He didn’t believe that, but it kept him from seeing the paw prints beside his imprints in the dust. 

The kitchen was a small space with functional counters. The single window in the room was small with thin fogged panes, but it was over the sink where he liked them, even when he could feel the late year chill through it. In the mornings, he rubbed the island he used as a butcher block with coarse salt and lemons. It was a rough grating base to the anemic melody of the few species of birds that stayed this far north coming through the thin back door. The wetted salt piles slowly turned pink then red as he worked to erase what he’d done the night before. 

After scrubbing the island, he would stand at the window and drink his coffee. It faced the side-yard and beyond that, the forest that ate up the hills for miles. Every morning, there was something in the yard, a bird, squirrels, sometimes deer. After weeks of it, he bought a yellow notebook to keep near the sink, next the blue one that was dog-eared and limp. 

He didn’t know how long he had been in the house before he saw the elk. It had been longer than months, but not so long that it didn’t still feel strange to think of it as his home. 

He never realized how huge elk were. 

The bull’s antlers looked like a statement against the trees. Their branches had nothing on him. The felt that covered them looked so soft. In the wide-ruled lines of his yellow notebook, he wrote how he thought they would feel under his hands. The scratch of his sharp-tipped pin was loud in the kitchen as he wrote. 

He felt like Darwin. 

He wondered who Darwin had felt like. 

 

There was a routine to living at the reaches of civilization. In the later morning, when the frost on the grass had turned to dew, he went out to chop wood. If there was enough wood, he cut two more logs then sat on the chair beside the pile and sharpen his ax with the sound of his stroop on the fine edge. 

There was a chicken coop beside the house with nothing in it. He packed the fresh wood there. When he brought it into the house, the scent of stale chicken shit and feed lingered on the bark until it started to burn. 

If it had rained, it rained often, he would walk the long driveway with the woods bordering him on either side. The branches were so thickly interlaced he could barely feel the sun, but it still left a stripe of light on the dirt track for him to walk in as he looked for areas of washout that needed to be filled. On good days, there were a few and he spend a couple of hours, filling and leveling them. 

Late afternoons, with his second cup of coffee, he sat on the back porch and stared into the trees. If the wind blew the wrong way, he could smell the drying blood in the ceramic bowls near him. The thought of going into the woods with his yellow notebook always crossed his mind. His elk had visited a few times since the first, but he could see more if he went out and looked. But he never did. The shadows looked like fingers on his land. For a man who wasn’t afraid of death, he was afraid of dread. He wrote those things in his blue book. 

After he saw the elk, he bought a bag of deer feed. When he dumped the meat from the ceramic bowls on the back porch in the mornings, leaving crystallized red streaks on his fingers, he would go to the shed near the treeline, dip a large red scoop in the barrel he kept the feed in and spread a line in the middle of the yard. 

More things came into the yard then. Raccoons and chipmunks became common, scouring the line during the day. So did the birds. It was almost common to see the elk. Once or twice a week, the massive shape of it would catch his eye as he went to start the coffee maker in the morning. 

The first time it happened, he didn’t give it any attention. It was something he would write in his blue notebook later, seeing shapes at the peripheral of his sight. Then it had bellowed, a sharp wavering sound that made every hair on the back of his neck stand. Instead of writing about things in the corner of his eyes in the blue book, he was able to write in the yellow. 

A month after the first time he saw it, the elk lay dead in his yard. 

Its remains steamed in the cold air of early morning. Feed still clung to its soft mouth. Chris touched the antlers that rose above his head. They felt like a pair of velvet gloves his mom had when he was young wrapped around bone. The rack was so much taller than he’d thought from the window. 

There were lacerations on its legs and hind quarters. Its stomach was torn open and its entrails were on the grass. Large canine prints were around it in the frost-white grass. 

The grass cracked beneath his feet as he went to the shed and dragged the metal barrel of feed as far into the shadow of the woods as he could force himself. His back was still warmed in morning sunlight as he dumped it on its side with a metallic thump. He left it there with the feed spilled out golden and brown on the leaves. 

That night as frost began to creep up the windows, he started the fire in the hearth. He tore pages from his yellow notebook, staring at the flames and listening to the slow rip of the pages as curls of spiral bound pages fell at his feet. He sat so close to the fireplace he could feel his skin burning, like standing in the sun. 

He didn’t fill the bowls on the back porch for a week. 

On the seventh morning, he walked into the kitchen so early it was still dark to start the coffee maker before heading toward the shower. The faint sound of nails on the back door stopped him at the mouth of the kitchen. He stared at the fireplace in the living room as the scratching came again. A whine echoed through the thin wood. 

He went to the fridge and took out a tray of steaks wrapped in plastic. The sound of the cellophane tearing was loud in the silence as he pulled the steaks out and laid them on the pitted island. The center of the steaks were gray as he cut the chunks large for one of them that knew how to chew before swallowing. He cut the other smaller. Choking probably didn’t hurt him anymore. 

He had never been so aware of the taste of his own tongue as he held the board with cut meat in one hand and held the door knob in the other. The clawing started again. It was so faint. It wasn’t imagined. He had heard voices inside of his head. Ones that talked about guilt and blame, sadness, loneliness that ate at him like the core of an apple. 

This wasn’t inside of himself. He could hear it. 

When he opened the door, there was nothing there, but the ceramic bowls had been moved. They were as white as he’d ever seen them, stained, but all fresh blood licked away and pressed against the porch railing. This late in the year, there was no noise. The insects were long dead. It was too early for morning birds and too late for the night ones. 

He kneeled in the doorway and could see his own breath in the light from the kitchen, steaming in front of him and parting around something he couldn’t see. He took a piece of the smaller meat chunks and held it out. A board of the porch squeaked to his right. He felt his heart beating behind his ribs. He wondered if they can still hear it. He couldn’t say why, but he knew that one of them was standing right beside him. The hair on the back of his neck raised. His breath still parted around the shape of the second right in front of him. 

But he couldn’t see them. 

He couldn’t feel them. 

“Take it,” he said, holding the meat out. 

His fingers were getting colder against the cool, damp meat in the frost laden air. 

“Please, just take it.” 

There was a whine. It was so quiet it could’ve been wind. 

“Stiles, please.” 

He eyes burned as he held the meat out for another moment before he stood and went to the bowls, filling both of them. 

He never felt them, but before he closed the back door, he saw his own imprints left in the frost on the porch. There were two sets of paws on either side. 

When the sun rose they would melt. 

He sank against the back door to the floor until he saw the orange bleeding through the thin window panes. It looks like stained glass through his wet eyes. He stared until it was only an old window, until he knew the only prints on the back porch must be his own and coyotes must always eat the meat he left out at night. 

He pushed himself from the floor, washed his hands, leaving pink streams against the porcelain. Then dried his hands a wrote in the blue journal left beside the sink.


End file.
